While blogging is often used to increase search visibility, establish expertise on a topic, and drive traffic to your website, it’s not often used to build your audience on social media, whether you are trying to build up your Twitter following, Facebook fans, or status on Tumblr. It’s a lost opportunity, as there is really nothing better than building on an audience you already have. (Of course, this can work in the other direction too—use social media to build up your blog audience.)
When building your social media following, just remember that quality of fans totally trumps quantity. And by quality, I mean the kinds of fans who engage with you, retweet your tweets, comment on Facebook posts, post to your Facebook wall, and, of course, become customers!
Let’s start with two very basic, common-sense things you need to do:
1. Add social share buttons at the bottom of each blog post to make it easy for your blog readers to spread the word about your fabulous blog and build awareness of your social media presence.
2. Add social media icons on every page of your website, especially if your website and blog are one and the same, which is becoming more and more common. Make as easy as possible for people to follow you on social media.
And here are four common-sense things you might not have thought of:
1. Promote your social media presence (with links to the accounts) in the bio you supply for guest blogging gigs. You’ll be reaching a whole new audience, and if they like what you wrote, hopefully they’ll feel compelled to connect with you on social media.
2. At the end of blog posts, add a link to the social media account you’d most like to promote, asking that people follow you there. This sounds so simple, but you will be amazed by what you can achieve just by asking.
3. Mention your social media accounts in blog posts. We’ve all got so much going on that we cannot remember everything, even if we have the best of intentions.
4. Reference tweets or Facebook posts, either from you or your audience, in your blog posts when relevant. Add screen shots if you can. You can also build entire blog posts around the conversations that are happening on Twitter and Facebook between you and your audience. People are very lemming-like, so the more you show your engagement on social media, the more people will want to be a part of all the fun you are having.
Image by Flickr user Holger Zscheyge (Creative Commons)
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Tags: blogging, blogs, Facebook, guest blogging, social media, Social networking, Tumblr, Twitter, Website
Posted in Marketing, Search Marketing, social media | 2 Comments »
